Sister Carrie Author Experience What most struck Sister Carrie's first readers was the clarity and understanding that Dreiser brought to the figure of Hurstwood. The novel's heroine, however, puzzled many reviewers, who found her to be, as William Marion Reedy put it, "real" but "paradoxically . . . shadowy.'' Words like "shadowy," "nebulous," "paradoxical" expressed the uneasiness early critics felt about the character. Even the book's admirers tended to think that its "extraordinary power . . . has little to …
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…emotional instability is in Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871- 1907 (New York; Putnam's, 1986), pp. 392-6. 17. Warwick Wadlington makes a strong case for the existence in Carrie of a "core of innate psychic activity that exists buried in all [Dreiser's] characters, rising fitfully, 'opportunistically' to the surface only when an external reality seems to promise fulfillment,'' in "Pathos and Dreiser," Southern Review 7 (Spring 1971): 411-29; reprinted in Pizer, Critical Essays, p. 222.